Hot Topics:

Opinion

Rio+20 fails to meet low expectations

By Bruce JonesForeign Policy

Posted:
06/24/2012 01:00:00 AM MDT

Early Tuesday morning, 1,000 or so advanced delegates at Rio+20 earth summit (formally, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development) laid down their pens and shut off their laptops. At noon, Brazil's foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, gaveled through the Outcome Document from the chair. And by mid-afternoon, Rio was full of a sound to which that joyous city is unaccustomed: the collective moan of 40,000 environmentalists disappointed about the results. (Yes, you read that right: 40,000. Alongside 10,000 official government participants.)

But if the environment movement expected Earth-saving outcomes from Rio, they were clearly enjoying too much of Brazil's famed cachaça.

That the Rio outcome fell short of the highest expectations was not only predictable, it was predicted — by everybody. A senior European Union negotiator told me last month that the EU's major focus had already turned to lowering expectations. That was wise: No credible analysis of environmental agreements past tells us that a global summit of this kind, with a broad, encompassing agenda, can actually deliver genuine changes in the way the world does its economic or energy business. Throw in a gloomy global economic situation, and major leaps forward were a non-starter.

Advertisement

There were some avoidable mistakes. Brazil got into an early fight with Mexico, which was simultaneously preparing the Los Cabos Summit of the G-20, about which country would "lead" on green growth issues. (As if the problem is that we have too much leadership on green growth, rather than a dearth of it.) The result was that rather than the G-20 negotiations bolstering Rio, the two processes proceeded in parallel. For the Rio process itself, the U.N. produced a reasonable backdrop analysis but never escaped the utterly opaque language of "sustainable development," and did far less than was necessary to shape the political space for action.

In practice, though, the best-organized process in the world wasn't going to produce serious outcomes on environmental issues, either in Rio or Mexico City. Climate is a thorny problem for both domestic and international governance. Multilateral fora at their best can be just a bit more than the sum of their parts; on the environment, the parts are awful. If the major economies, rich and developing, all had serious climate strategies, the question of which forum they negotiated in would be relevant but not determinant. Absent that, the shape of the negotiating table hardly matters.

What's more, the outcomes from Rio aren't all bad. The Europeans will be disappointed that there's not a shiny new environment agency at the U.N., a goal they've been pursuing since 2004 — which means there've been eight years in which they've failed to explain to anyone but themselves why one might matter, or what, exactly, it would do. What the text does contain are some sensible changes to the way the existing U.N. Environment Program works — a rare victory for the modest-but-sensible over the flashy-but-poorly-thought-through. The document will also launch a process (or, unfortunately, a series of processes) to negotiate something called "sustainable development goals," to mirror and/or replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015. Color me skeptical on the SDGs, and the process set out is cumbersome; but at least the summit avoiding locking in specific goals without doing the necessary spade work on evidence and coalition building. Sometimes kicking the can down the road is exactly the right thing to do.

What's really a shame about Rio is that the belabored negotiations over the formal outcome document displaced time and attention from far more creative actions that could make a genuine difference. One of these is the Sustainable Energy for All Initiative — a rare U.N. process that links energy and finance wings of government with private actors to drive investment in green technology that can be used not only in rich but also in developing countries. SE4ALL, as it's known, isn't going to stop climate change, but it can make a noticeable difference in real time and set precedents for how to mobilize joint action by the public and private sectors.

The hard truth is, of the unrealistic and unhelpful voices on multilateral process, the environmental lobby stands out. In watching Rio unfold, I was struck by the sheer number that would be present. Consider this: The total number of people in Rio for the summit roughly equaled the number of soldiers that Britain sent to French beaches on D-Day. Is there any question about which was the more credible mobilization?

Most baffling is the phenomenon of otherwise sober, hard-headed analysts judging summits, G-mechanisms, and multilateral negotiations by grossly unrealistic standards, often eschewing basic realism in a way that they would never do in examining state policy or a bilateral relationship. Tough problems are, well, tough, whether it's a government, private sector, or multilateral actor working with the issue. The best forum and best process can help policy achieve policy outcomes, but they don't create silver bullets. As former U.S. national security advisor Brent Scowcroft so wisely said last week -- of another incredibly tough process generating hyperbole and excess expectations, Syria — "just because there's a problem doesn't mean there's a solution." Realism rules the roost in analysis of statecraft and state-based negotiations; it's just as important in assessing multilateral action, be it at the G-20, Rio+20 or another summit run amok.

Bruce Jones is director of the Managing Global Order program at Brookings Institute, and of the NYU Center on International Cooperation.

Missy Franklin, Jenny Simpson, Adeline Gray and three other Colorado women could be big players at the 2016 Rio OlympicsWhen people ask Missy Franklin for her thoughts about the Summer Olympics that will begin a year from Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro, she hangs a warning label on her answer.